Minutes after President Barack Obama announced that he was nominating appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, battle lines were drawn on the pre-scripted questions of "post-racial" America: will she favor minority groups or judge all citizens equally? Will she treat alleged criminals and other down-and-out litigants with "empathy" (the Beltway buzzword du jour) or take a hard-line approach? And will she be a "judicial activist," or will her decisions hew to the text of the written law (so-called strict constructionism)?

But missed in these debates is Sotomayor's stance on a basic tenet of American liberty: freedom of speech, without which all other rights are functionally meaningless. One might attribute the press back-burnering her focus in this area of law to Sotomayor's relative lack of decision-making on First Amendment cases. But, more likely, this reflects the modern bipartisan disregard for free speech — a right strongly valued from Thomas Jefferson to George Carlin, but one that has steadily eroded over the past four decades. Still, it is essential to consider how Sotomayor, currently a judge on an intermediate federal appeals court in New York, stacks up on free speech. Initially, a mixed picture emerges.

Most disturbing is Sotomayor's signing onto an opinion written by one of her colleagues in a May 2008 case limiting the speech rights of public-high-school students. Avery Doninger, a student-council officer in Connecticut, got into a tiff with school administrators who canceled a student-initiated band competition. Doninger lambasted the administration on (in the court's words) "an independently operated, publicly accessible blog," saying the event was axed "due to douchebags," and asked readers to phone school officials in protest. Her strategy worked, enraging those officials who said that "appealing directly to the public was not an appropriate means of resolving complaints the students had regarding school administrators' decisions." For this, Doninger was not permitted to assume the class office to which she had been duly elected.

The decision was a betrayal of the Vietnam War–era Supreme Court decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), in which the justices protected the right of students to wear a black armband protesting the war: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Since then, however, free-speech rights of students and adults alike have been whittled down by Supreme Court justices both liberal (some have allowed fundamental political speech to be controlled in the campaign-finance arena by federal bureaucrats, a development that Sotomayor praised in a 1996 speech) and conservative (the court's right wing has largely targeted high-school-student speech touching upon either sex or drugs, as well as student newspapers). Sotomayor's signing onto the Connecticut Doningerv. Niehoff opinion doesn't provide any confidence that she would seek to roll back the tide of censorship, though she did, in a 2006 Vermont case, uphold the right of a 13-year-old student to wear a T-shirt critical of George W. Bush. Does this signal a pattern that allows students to engage in political speech but not in harsh criticism of school administrators?

Benign neglect? If you are gay or lesbian, or if you care about realizing social justice, you must be wondering when Obama is going to turn his attention to the fact that one in 10 of the nation's more than 230 million adults are second-class citizens.

The 13th Annual Muzzle Awards A year and a half into the Age of Obama, we are learning a lesson we should have figured out long ago — that repression, once in place, is rarely rolled back all the way, and that liberals no less than conservatives are reluctant to give up power.

A step forward The nation’s understandable preoccupation with the unfolding economic crisis has overshadowed a significant victory in the battle for same-sex marriage: the Connecticut Supreme Court, on October 10, ruled that gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry.

The 12th Annual Muzzle Awards With the era of repression and secrecy fostered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney finally over, this should be the best of times for freedom of expression, open government, and civil liberties. Yet change comes slowly.

Speak no evil? Anthony Lewis's free-speech credentials are impeccable: among other things, the former New York Times columnist is James Madison Visiting Professor of First Amendment Issues at Columbia University's Journalism School

Free speech for me, but not for thee Last Thursday's Supreme Court opinion striking down corporate campaign advertising restrictions might as well have been divorce papers in the rocky marriage between the political left and the First Amendment.

Critical Mass If free speech is what gives value to the campus "marketplace of ideas," UMass Amherst would long ago have gone bankrupt.

Under attack Recent decisions by President Barack Obama and Maine Governor John Baldacci have dampened progressive hopes that the Republican-inspired war on civil liberties might be winding down.

Bully pulpit While I understand, appreciate, and respect the First Amendment and our right to speak freely, in the case of bullying, Harvey Silverglate makes a dangerous assumption that “civilized people, even teenagers can intuit the difference between protected speech and criminal harassment.”